Back Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers

Henry James: Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers

Edited by Leon Edel and Mark Wilson

“[A] great American novelist who wrote more superb criticism than any compatriot, before or since.”— Time

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

Video Henry James, Theodore Roosevelt, and the search for “Americanism”
March 23, 2016

Save $30 when you buy both volumes of Henry James’s literary criticism

Henry James, renowned as one of the world’s great novelists, was also one of the most illuminating, audacious, and masterly critics of modern times. This Library of America volume and its companion are a fitting testimony to his unprecedented achievement. They offer the only comprehensive collection of his critical writings ever assembled, more than one-third of which have never appeared in book form.

This first volume focuses especially on his responses to American and English writers; the second volume contains his essays on European literature and the Prefaces to the New York Edition of his fiction.

From 1864 until virtually the end of his life, James displayed an astonishing range and catholicity of critical interests, touching on nearly every facet of literature in America, England, and Europe. Here are his most important theoretical essays, including his witty and daring declarations of the novelist’s freedom in “The Art of Fiction,” “The Future of the Novel,” and “The Science of Criticism”—a gently ironic title from a writer who regarded criticism as a form of art.

Appreciations of Ralph Waldo Emerson (“I knew he was great, greater than any of our friends”), pungent comments (which he later regretted) on Walt Whitman’s “Drum-Taps,” and assessments of Louisa May Alcott, Edgar Allan Poe, his friend and admirer William Dean Howells, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Francis Parkman, and scores of other American writers are joined, in revealing proximity, to commentaries on nearly every important English writer of fiction (and some poets, such as the Brownings) during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

These reviews of English writers include James’s stunning essay on Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, his provocative discussions of George Eliot, and his tough but appreciative estimates of Anthony Trollope, Matthew Arnold, Benjamin Disraeli, Elizabeth Gaskell, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, William Morris, Rupert Brooke, Ouida, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Also included here is his great essay on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. All of these pieces are gathered under the author considered, so that James’s supple changes in attitude can be followed across the years.

Of particular interest, both critically and biographically, are James’s commentaries on Nathaniel Hawthorne, including his still-controversial book-length study of 1879. His estimates of his predecessor’s work remain highly debatable, but are perhaps more interesting as evidence of his own feelings about being an American writer of a later and, as he assumed, more complex time.

Finally, this volume includes two invaluable collections: his “American Letters” and “London Notes,” wherein, with unsurpassed tact and grandeur of mind, he introduces readers of his native and of his adopted country to each other.

Leon Edel (1907–1997), volume editor, was emeritus professor of English at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. His five-volume biography of Henry James received both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. Mark Wilson, associate editor of this volume, was professor of English at the University of Hawaii, Manoa.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Henry James: Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers is kept in print by a gift from Nancy M. Edwards to the Guardians of American Letters Fund in memory of Thomas R. Edwards Jr.
Table of Contents

Essays on Literature
The Works of Epictetus (1866)
Recent Volumes of Poems (1867)
Modern Women (1868)
New Novels (1875)
Recent Novels (1876)
The Art of Fiction (1885, 1893)
An Animated Conversation (1889, 1893)
Letter to the Deerfield Summer School (1889)
The Science of Criticism (1891, 1893)
The Future of the Novel (1899)
The Present Literary Situation in France (1899)
The New Novel (1914)
Mr. and Mrs. James T. Fields (1915)
The Founding of the “Nation” (1915)

American Writers
Louisa M. Alcott
William Rounseville Alger
H. Willis Baxley
John Burroughs
George H. Calvert
William Ellery Channing
Rebecca Harding Davis
John W. De Forest
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Henrietta (Deluzy-Desportes) Field
Julia Constance Fletcher
William C. Gannett
Henry Harland
James Albert Harrison
Gilbert Haven
Julian Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne
William Dean Howells
Helen Hunt Jackson and Rhoda Broughton
James Russell Lowell
Philip Van Ness Myers
Ehrman Syme Nadal
Charles Nordhoff
Francis Parkman
Albert Rhodes
Addison Peale Russell
Henry D. Sedley
Anne Moncure (Crane) Seemüller
Alvan S. Southworth
Harriet Elizabeth (Prescrott) Spofford
Elizabeth Stoddard
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Bayard Taylor
James Whistler
Walt Whitman
Adeline Dutton Whitney
Constance Fenimore Woolson

American Letters; from Literature (1898)

English Writers
Matthew Arnold
Sir Samuel Baker
William Black
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Rupert Brooke
Stopford A. Brooke
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Robert Browning
Frederick G. Burnaby
George Gordon, Lord Byron
Verney Lovett Cameron
Elizabeth Rundle Charles
Dutton Cook
Hubert Crackanthorpe
Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
Oswald John Frederick Crawford (John Latouche)
Charles Dickens
Benjamin Disraeli
Lady Lucie Duff-Gordon
George du Maurier
George Eliot
Frances Elliot
James Anthony Froude
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
Charles C. F. Greville
Philip Gilbert Hamerton
Thomas Hardy
Augustus J. C. Hare
Abraham Hayward
Sir Arthur Helps
Rosamond and Florence Hill
Ann Jameson
Frances Anne Kimble
Charles Kingsley
Henry Kingsley
Thomas Laurence Kington-Oliphant
Rudyard Kipling
Cornelia Knight
John A. Lawson
Henrietta Louisa (Farrer) Lear
David Livingstone
William Charles Macready
Anne E. Manning
Theodore Martin
David Masson
Thomas Moore and William Jerdan
William Morris
Laurence Oliphant
Ouida (Marie Louise de la Ramée)
Nassau W. Senior
William Shakespeare
Samuel Smiles and Sarah Tytler
George Barnett Smith
Robert Louis Stevenson
Algernon Charles Swinburne
William Makepeace Thackeray
John Thomson
Anthony Trollope
T. Adolphus Trollope
John Tyndall
D. Mackenzie Wallace
Mrs. Humphrey Ward
Andrew Wilson
Andrew Wynter
Charlotte Mary Yonge and Francis Awdry

London Notes (1897)

40.00 List Price: $50.00 (Save: 20%) Free shipping on orders $50 and over

Or buy from our partners

Phone orders: 1-800-964-5778 Request product #200222

ISBN: 978-0-94045022-6 1484 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 22 Library of America Series

Subscribers can purchase the slipcased edition by signing in to their accounts.

Related Books

Henry James: Collected Travel Writings: Great Britain and America LOA N°64

Edgar Allan Poe: Essays & Reviews LOA N°20

Edmund Wilson: Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s and 40s LOA N°177

Edmund Wilson: Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s and 30s LOA N°176

Henry James: Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, Prefaces to the New York Edition LOA N°23

Library of America

CURATOR

A champion of America’s great writers and timeless works, Library of America guides readers in finding and exploring the exceptional writing that reflects the nation’s history and culture.

Learn More

PUBLISHER

From poetry, novels, and memoirs to journalism, crime writing, and science fiction, the more than 300 volumes published by Library of America are widely recognized as America’s literary canon.

Browse our books Subscribe

NON-PROFIT

With contributions from donors, Library of America preserves and celebrates a vital part of our cultural heritage for generations to come.

Support our mission

Henry James: Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers

Related Books

Get 10% off your first Library of America purchase.